Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is the second SCUMM game from Lucasfilm Games (aka LucasArts), after Maniac Mansion, with game development led by David Fox, and with Matthew Alan Kane as co-designer and co-programmer. It was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1988, and this enhanced FM Towns port was published in Japan in 1990 by Fujitsu. The game is playable in both English and Japanese.
Continue reading Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, FM Towns
Chaos Strikes Back is a continuation of the classic Role-Playing Game, Dungeon Master. It’s a sequel – but not the sequel – to the first game, and was originally released as a stand-alone expansion disk on the Atari ST. On the FM Towns it was published on CD-ROM by Victor Musical Industries in 1990, and there’s a bit of faffing around to do before you can actually start the game*. Thankfully you can at least do this in English as there’s an option to play in that language.
*= Before you can play Chaos Strikes Back you must either create a new party (by entering the prison and choosing from the available portraits), and then save it to a new 720Kb floppy disk; or load a set of characters from a pre-existing FM Towns Dungeon Master save. You then need to enter the CSB portrait editor utility program and then click on ‘Make New Adventure’ to activate and save a new Chaos Strikes Back file to the disk. Only then will you be able to load and start the game…
The FM Towns conversion of Taito‘s smash hit arcade shooter, Operation Wolf, is both an authentic port of the original, and also a playable and fun game that utilises mouse controls to great effect. It was first published by Ving in 1990.
Released into arcades by Taito in 1990, Space Gun is a first-person sci-fi horror shooter set on a crippled spaceship that has been overrun by killer aliens. It can be played by one or two players.
This over-the-top action game was developed and published by Data East in 1990 and in it you play as Edward Randy, an Indiana Jones-style adventurer who is fighting against an army of evil soldiers, led by “Dark Ogre“, and who’ve kidnapped his friend’s daughter Charlotte, who he is trying to rescue.
The PC MS-DOS version of Konami‘s Castlevania was developed by Unlimited Software, Inc. (the same company that did the C64 conversion), and first published in North America in 1990. As far as I know it didn’t get a release in Europe or Japan.
The Commodore 64 version of Castlevania was converted by Unlimited Software, Inc. and published by Konami in 1990, and it’s not a bad port overall. It’s arguably better than the dodgy Amiga version.
The Amiga version of Konami‘s classic Castlevania was ported by Novotrade and first released in 1990. I was surprised and excited that the first Castlevania had actually been released for the Amiga, but after playing it I kinda wish they hadn’t bothered, because it’s bloody awful.
The third game in the Castlevania series, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, was first released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1989 in Japan (under the title of “Akumajō Densetsu“). A North American NES release followed in 1990, and a European release in 1992.
Continue reading Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, NES/Famicom
The Amstrad CPC version of Shadow of the Beast was developed and published by Gremlin Graphics in 1990 and is similar to the ZX Spectrum version (which was also created by Gremlin), but with more on-screen colours. It requires 128K of RAM to run, so is for Amstrad 6128 machines and compatibles only, and is spread over two floppy disks.
The King of Grabs 